No Herb of Help
by nebroadwe
Summary: Anime or mangaverse. When Paninya told Winry about Dominic giving her new legs and a new life, she left out a few things. Set preseries.


_"What wound did ever heal but by degrees?"_  
-- William Shakespeare, _Othello_

**oOoOoOo**

Once a month he comes down the mountain to bully deals out of suppliers, sneer at the hack work of would-be rivals, and generally remind Rush Valley that Dominic LeCourt is still alive. He stalks along the avenues, toolbag slung over his shoulder, scattering lesser engineers before him like pigeons. He'll never admit that their awed stares please him, but his grim jaw has relaxed slightly by the time he enters the hospital.

A deferential nurse shows him to the exam room and provides a chart. He drops his toolkit with apparent carelessness, popping the latch while ignoring her expressive wince. The flimsy sheets record nothing of note, so he dismisses the nurse back to her station. Then he folds his arms across his chest to wait.

The delay is just long enough to acetify him back to baseline -- then the door slams open and his current client rolls herself into the room. Paninya parks her wheelchair right at his toes, pouts up at him and demands, "Take them off! I don't want them anymore!"

"Why not?" he growls back. Even if she's too young to grasp the value of a custom automail installation by a biomechanical master, she ought to be streetwise enough not to look a gift horse in the mouth. "Got a problem with them?"

She grabs her own skinny elbows beneath the short sleeves of her gown, mimicking him. "They don't work."

Those are fighting words. He bends down, planting his horny palms on the arms of the wheelchair, and scowls at her. She's not intimidated. "You _said,"_ she continues, her voice a tart, recriminatory whine, "that I'd be able to walk on them."

"Eventually," he replies, in the tone he reserves for clients who, by not listening, are going the right way to losing his services.

This client doesn't care. "They hurt, they're too heavy and they _don't work,"_ she insists. Her dark skin is a little flushed, her eyes bright with something that isn't fever.

He almost asks her if she wants her money back, except that some blows are too low for any fight short of life and death. Instead, he straightens and says, "Somebody dump you out of that chair again?"

The hit lands fair and she gasps at the impact. He heard last month that she's been sneaking out of the hospital, to the dismay of her nurses and that gray, defeated woman, her guardian. He's not surprised. In fact, he's mildly impressed by her ingenuity -- the clinic's staff is attentive and its security excellent. His approval of her wits is tempered, however, by disdain for her doings: begging from tourists and taunting her fellow street brats. "You shouldn't pick fights you can't win," he adds, and steps behind the exam table as she tries to run over his boots.

Balked, she screeches, _"Take them off! Now!"_

He hoists her out of the chair and plumps her onto the table. It's the work of a moment to remove her legs, by contrast to the hours of surgery required to install them. He scrawls a discharge order into the chart; then he gathers up her prostheses with his tools and departs, shouting for an orderly to take the girl back to her room.

"Thanks for nothing!" she yells after him.

**oOoOoOo**

Later, after a satisfying round of purchases that leaves him unexpectedly skint, he stretches his admitting privileges at the hospital to include a bed for the night in a call room. He sleeps soundly, waking only when the janitor grumbles his way in at dawn to mop up the puddle of urine that's leaked over the sill. _Toilet down the hall, ain't it clean enough for 'em? Floor looks cleaner? I clean these floors; I clean that toilet. Nobody drunk enough here to tell me they can't aim. Use a trash can, but no, they gotta pee, they pee on the floor. Toilet ain't good enough ..._

Dominic ignores him. "Coward," he mutters under his breath.

**oOoOoOo**

The following month he detours through the market and finds Paninya panhandling underneath the Valley's tacky welcome arch. She trundles out to meet him as he bears down on her. "Spare change for a poor cripple, mister?" she asks, all treacle and dole, hands outstretched.

Dodging behind the wheelchair, he starts it rolling before she can set the brake, pushing faster than her no longer quite so skinny arms can counter. She screams blue murder all the way to the hospital, to the amusement of the layabouts who jeer as they pass. Eventually she runs out of breath and shuts up, so that the lobby at least is spared her trite conjectures about his sexual habits. He turns her over to an orderly and saunters off to check whether the room he reserved has been properly prepared. As he washes his hands, he exchanges an amiable grunt with the nurse-anesthetist.

The orderly has Paninya disinfected and gowned in jig time, wheeling her into the room just as Dominic removes her new and improved legs from their case. Her hands are clutched together into a single fist in her lap, her mouth working. He guesses that she can't decide whether to be angry or scared and he's tempted to let her pee herself this time. But that would delay the installation, so he looks down his nose at her and proclaims, "I don't give second chances."

Her jaw sets. She can't outstare him, so she lifts herself up in the wheelchair and glowers dubiously at the automail. "Are _these_ ones gonna let me walk?"

"Eventually."

She shrugs, flops back into her seat, and lets the orderly lift her onto the table. Having swabbed her arm with alcohol, the nurse injects her with a syringe of barbiturate and keeps a finger on her pulse as they wait for the sedative to take effect. Dominic leans over the nurse's shoulder. "Don't start fights you can't win," he advises his client.

Paninya grins sleepily and sticks out her tongue.


End file.
